Readability: The Bookmarklet

Like many, I visually “scan” more than actually “read” web pages, and if I hit on a post or article of any length, I usually print it out and read the hard copy. It’s just easier to read that way. Reading online at length is a pain. Yet even the print-it-out strategy too often fails because the web page lacks a good print style sheet or is not otherwise well designed for printing.

What to do? Try this, on both counts:

Readability – An arc90 Lab Experiment, which creates a custom bookmarklet for you, based on your choice of font style, text size and content margins. (There is a helpful explanation of the thinking behind its purpose and function.) Make your selections and then drag the designated “Readability” link to your browser’s toolbar. Henceforth, when you’re at a web page with content you wish had better online readability, click on the bookmarklet, to great effect.

Here’s a concrete example to better make the point, with the Readability bookmarklet set to “Newspaper, Medium, Wide”…

True Irish, a memorable New York Times blog item by Timothy Egan about the Irish of Butte, Montana. (As a side note, the article cuts to my heart since my great grandfather and grandfather, among several other family ancestors, are from Butte. That’s my great grandfather, to the right, who is buried in the cemetery mentioned in the article.) In fairness, the blog item itself is well set typographically and displays nicely as a web page; the print version, not so much. But if you use the Readability bookmarklet, you get an entirely different experience: A 550px wide display of only the blog article, with all the other, extraneous page information removed. All you see is what you want to read. And you can print it out, also without all the extraneous stuff:

Needless to say, “Ní­l aon tintéan mar do thintéan féin.”